Page 55 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

54 How to write critical essays
These strategic issues must all have been examined and
resolved before you set out upon your first sentence. There you
will be accompanied by your reader who will already be
expecting guidance as to what is worth noticing and why. You
must have a plan.
All critics do, of course, discover more about the text and
their own thoughts as they write. While you are striving to
find the best words with which to explain one point, you will
often be alerted to some new idea. Then you may quite rightly
decide to adapt your original structure so that your latest
thoughts can be included. However, the more thought
provoking you find the actual process of writing, the more
essential it is to have already committed yourself to an overall
design. You can then see whether what has just occurred to
you does belong in the paragraph which you then happen to
be writing. It may belong in a much earlier or later one. It may
even deserve a paragraph to itself. If so, you must have a
planned sequence so that you can see where the new
paragraph can most logically be inserted.
Before you begin to compose any part of your essay, write
out in note form the main points you mean to make. Add cross-
references to relevant passages in your full notes: to passages
that offer more detailed evidence with which to define and
support each proposition or those which offer more extended
summaries of the arguments involved. Revise your ordering of
your main points until you are satisfied that you have found the
most illuminating and persuasive sequence in which to lead
your reader through them.
If this process proves so difficult that it threatens to consume
a great deal of time, ask yourself whether you are ready to
design a plan and to write your essay. It may be that you still
need to do more reading, thinking and note taking.
Throughout that earlier stage of researching an answer, you
should have been wondering how many issues your essay can
explore, and how they relate to each other. As your reading led
you to ask one question, you will have been trying to see
whether an answer to it must depend on other problems which
need to be resolved first. Conversely, you will have been
wondering, once you have decided on how a given issue should
be resolved, whether that answer in itself provokes other
questions. You will also have been curious, as more and more